The use of facsimile transmission equipment has been steadily increasing over recent years. Facsimile transmission is a very convenient mechanism of transmitting documents and images from one location to another in near real time. The almost instantaneous transmission speed of facsimile transmission equipment is a huge advantage over regular conventional mail delivery and accounts for the immense popularity of facsimile as the transmission mechanism of choice in many businesses.
With the exploding use of facsimile equipment today, there are many businesses that conduct a substantial amount of their business through facsimile transmissions. In addition, many businesses and government agencies use facsimile equipment to send and receive data on a daily basis. These same companies typically also employ sophisticated telephone systems for handling their high volume of inbound and outbound telephone calls. Many businesses such as banking institutions, insurance companies and government entities have an additional requirement of recording and archiving telephone conversations occurring on company telephones. The necessity of recording telephone calls might be required for any number of reasons such as security, liability, eavesdropping, etc. Telephone archiving systems exist today and are employed by many businesses to record, on a long term basis, all internal and external telephone calls.
The majority of businesses today, such as banking institutions, insurance companies, law firms and government agencies, employ one or more local area networks (LANs) to connect their computer terminals together and to permit the sharing of information. In addition, almost every business today employs one or more facsimile machines to send and receive documents over telephone lines. It would be very desirable if the facsimile machines within an organization could be controlled from the LAN. Further, it would also be desirable if the facsimile machines could be interfaced to network applications that perform billing and maintenance functions.
The necessity to account and for facsimile document transmissions exists today and is currently performed either manually or by specific hardware which is connected to the facsimile machine. An operator keys in the identification and/or account information for the document to be faxed. Currently no means exists for coupling a facsimile machine to billing applications that does not require specialized hardware to be attached to the facsimile machine.
In addition, the process of sending a document from a facsimile machine, in the majority of businesses, requires that the operator place the document in the facsimile machine and wait until a confirmation is generated that the transmission was successful or not. Currently, no means exists whereby the user can get confirmation sent to their networked computer workstation that her/his document was successfully transmitted.
Further, in the majority of large organizations, tens or even hundreds of facsimile machines are installed. Thus, there is a need for centralized management of these facsimile machines. It is desirable that the central management provide status data concerning the operational status of all the facsimile machines in the organization. Thus, a technician can be informed that a specific facsimile machine is either disconnected from the telephone line or is malfunctioning, for example.
Also, most modern facsimile machines today support what is called subaddressing which entails the transmission of additional codes that are typically used to route incoming facsimile transmissions. The rules for routing facsimile messages are defined in ITU T.30 and T.33 standard specifications. However, the majority of facsimile machines in use today do not support subaddressing. It would be desirable if the subaddressing feature could be added to facsimile machines that do not incorporate this feature.
As with voice telephone call long term storage and retrieval, there is a long felt need by many businesses to be able to store on a long term basis, both inbound and outbound facsimile transmissions. Facsimile storage systems exist in the prior art however none disclose the long term storage, archival and retrieval of facsimile transmissions.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,935,955, issued to Neudorfer, discloses a system for interfacing central office telephone lines with internal facsimile machines. Incoming facsimile transmission data is placed in a memory temporary storage area after being received and before being transmitted. Facsimile transmissions are deleted from the storage after they are transmitted.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,235,433, issued to Clarkson et al., discloses a system and method for automatically indexing facsimile transmissions into an image management system by applying telephony data accompanying the facsimile transmission to index the transmission by use of a substitution table.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,357,562, issued to Metser et al., discloses an automated facsimile/voice memory managing system which includes a facsimile board, a voice response board, a storage device and central processing unit (CPU). The storage means disclosed, however, is used to store facsimile transmissions on a temporary basis.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,014,300, issued to Harvath et al., discloses a facsimile store and forward network that includes a network access device and an address processing unit that cooperates to interface an originating facsimile machine with a store and forward inbound node. Facsimile transmissions, however, are stored on a temporary basis only.
Another potential problem that exists in present facsimile transmission storage devices is that if the facsimile transmission equipment is using a proprietary non-standard facsimile protocol, it becomes impossible to receive and store it without knowledge of the protocol. One solution to this problem is to have the facsimile transmission recording equipment determine the facsimile protocol to use and subsequently instruct the two facsimile machines accordingly.